Writer Unboxed

Is it springtime yet? I’m reeeeaaally ready for it. Until then, here are some newsy tidbits of interest to writers:

Awww. I just started watching American Idol this season, and I wanted to feel guilty because it’s t.v. crack, not because they are exploiting their writers (a sad theme in the “reality” television industry):

A year after the Writers Guild of America ended a major strike, members of the WGA West had picket signs out in Los Angeles. Their target? The biggest show on television: Fox’s “American Idol.”

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Carrying signs reading, “‘Idol’ gives back … but not to its workers” and chanting, “Simon, Simon, you can’t hide, we can see your greedy side!” the writers and their supporters were trying to pressure FremantleMedia North America, “Idol’s” producer, to provide its writers and other workers with standard industry health care and pension benefits.

“We’ve got men and women writing reality and game shows for a lot of very successful companies and not getting the basic protections — pension, health insurance, credits and things — that writers in this town routinely get,” WGAW president Patric Verrone said. “We’re hoping we can achieve that with Fremantle.”

These shows make breathtaking amounts of money. The very least they can do is offer health insurance to their workers.

Valued contributor Barbara Samuel is offering a new session of her popular online writing classes:

RECLAIMING THE MAGIC
How to get your groove back and find the joy in writing again

Some of the topics we will explore are:

Clearing the Decks: remembering the original lure into the writing business. What to keep? What to throw to the seas?

Manifesto and Connection: honoring yourself and your own call to write; connecting to the inner approval guidance system: getting back to your own agenda
Particulars: individual challenges
Celebration: remembering all the great things about being a writer
Flexibility, reinvention, staying in the game

Click HERE for more information.

Doubleday executives are probably breathing a sigh of relief. Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown has finished his next book:

“The Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown has finished a new book based on the fictional Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, television show “Entertainment Tonight” reported on Thursday.

Movie director Ron Howard, who made the 2006 film adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code” with Tom Hanks playing the central role of Langdon, told “Entertainment Tonight” the author’s latest work features the same character, but details were scant.

Other media outlets have reported that Brown’s next book has the working title “The Solomon Key,” is based in Washington, D.C. and centers on the Freemasons.

We’d heard rumors that Brown had missed his deadline in 2008, contributing to Doubleday’s woes, so we’re happy for both of them.

Meanwhile, Tolkien fans can rejoice! Another early work by Tolkien is going to be released:

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, a reworking in verse of old Norse epics, predates Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy,

According to the publishers, the book will include an introduction by Tolkien and notes by his son, Christopher.

The book, which was written at least 80 years ago, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May.

Yay!

In other classic novelist news, someone has taken the Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice and re-imagnined it as a zombie horror novel:

These days, America is menaced by zombie banks and zombie computers. What’s next, a zombie Jane Austen?

In fact, yes. Minor pandemonium ensued in the blogosphere this month after Quirk Books announced the publication of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” an edition of Austen’s classic juiced up with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem” by a Los Angeles television writer named Seth Grahame-Smith. (First line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”)

After the myriad of bad Austen rip-offs floating around out there, this one actually intrigues me.

Write on!

Image by Fairy-Bluebird.

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.